Way back in the early '80's I worked the gun counter for a local sporting goods store. When the store manager found out I had a thing for military and class III weapons he revealed to me that he owned a Soluthurn S-18 semi-auto anti-tank rifle of WW II vintage. I don't, in the fog of years, recall which model (100, 1000 or 1100), but it had a nifty wooden crate with a myriad of tools and spare parts.

Upon examining and handling it, I wanted more than anything to shoot it at least once but he was very loath to do so, having only 10 rounds of ammunition. He later traded it in to a local Class III dealer for a 1928A1 Thompson and some unspecified amount of cash. I was very disappointed.

I guess I'm too much of a military historian, and not enough of a "bigger boom = bigger fun" fan. To me, the idea of a single-shot 20mm is an emphatic FAIL. Single-shot fifties at least have a viable military use: long range sniping against people and light vehicles. 20mm was designed as a light antiaircraft and antivehicle round; to use it as a conventional heavy machine gun against foot soldiers, like a supersized .50-cal, was against the Geneva Conventions.

Wolfwalker, sometimes the Dictators send out their SS Troops in APC's to "maintain Order". Not saying it could happen here in the U.S., but if you want to follow a "Deterrence Strategy" against wannabe Tyrants....

If Wolfwalker were a military historian, he wouldn't mention the Geneva Conventions without actually looking at them. 20mm ammo has nothing to do with EPWs or medical facilities. He may be thinking about the Hague Conventions but 20mm isn't against those either. If he were thinking of the Geneva Protocol of the Hague Convention, it prohibits bio & chem weapons.

I don't know if there was one on the line, but it wouldn't have been all that noticeable amongst the other noise. (Other than the occasional big cannon or burst from a minigun, it's all just one big wall of sound.)

One of the hidden pleasures of watching District 9 was the review of actual South African military hardware. Those cute bullpups? Neopup CR-21. The big sniper rifle? NTW-20 (yeah, 20mm anti-material rifle lie in the pic). The big semi auto Kobus shoots the battle suit with? Neopup PAW-20 20mm grenade launcher.

Anyway, there is no prohibition against using a .50 in an anti-personnel role. File that one next to the "Mattel" M-16. For whatever reason both kept popping up in Basic Training, at least 35 years ago, along with the 5.56 round "tumbling" in flight.

Which it did, if it hit something along the way to the target, bit not as a fiendish design feature to make it even more lethal.

The Hague Conventions (to which the United States is a signatory, with reservations) dictate against weapons that cause "unnecessary suffering." The classic example is dum-dum bullets and those with poisonous substances added to them. American Soldiers are specifically informed that all their issued weapons and ammunition are legal under said Convention, and also told not to alter their weapons, as this would not only violate the Conventions in a technical sense, but probably also void the warranty in many cases (jk).

A 20mm antitank rifle used to shoot a human? Rather than a violation of the Hague Conventions, it's more appropriately considered a tragic waste of ammo, unless the human is wearing three or more stars and nothing else is handy.

2) it's generally considered a violation of international law and the "laws of war" to use light explosive shells against unprotected, unarmored infantry.

On checking, I find that the relevant language is not in the Geneva Conventions, but rather is in the Hague Convention of 1907 and also the St. Petersburg Declaration of 1868. The United States is signatory to the former, and has generally abided by the latter as well. Taken together, the two treaties are interpreted to forbid the use of light automatic cannon, such as 20mm and 40mm, on foot soldiers.

Hey, if I had that kind of cash I might take you up on it. I think that the guy who owned the Solothurn told me that it took the same ammo as a Lahti, and the S-18/100 takes a shorter round, so it must have been an S-18/1000 because his was semi-auto. I think the S-18/1100 was SELECT FIRE (try hanging onto that for a full 10 round magazine burst).

Remember, when he traded off his gun, transferable machineguns were still being built new and were not nearly as expensive as now, so he got some cash to boot with the '28A1.

BTW, I hope you've got plenty of ammo, I don't know how long he owned the gun, but he had only fired it a few times and when he got down to just enough rounds to fill one magazine he wouldn't shoot it.

They have a supressor that is very effective for that thing. If you look at their website you can see it being fired. The recoil impulse isn't that bad, but the detached retina syndrone is still a problem, heh. And the first one was built in response to an army RFP.emdfl

They aren't fired at humans ... just military equipment. Like uniforms, or helmets.

Montie: Got 25 rounds of brass, and 3 unfired original API rounds.

Yea, it fires the same round as the S-1000, not the short round that the Italian's S-100 uses.

This ATR is hard on brass, the rims get beaten hard by the ejector. Even fired single shot, I can only get so many shot until the case mouth splits, even with annealing ( brass anneals opposite steel ... quench it to make it soft ).

Tam is right (as usual). I have seen a lot of gun camera footage from attack helicopters in both Desert storm and the current Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns documenting kills on unarmored enemy combatants both in the open and under what they thought was cover.

As an Army Infantry officer,I was never told we could not use light cannon on troops. I can recall one combined arms exercise in which I called in some A-7's to prep and area which, for purposes of the exercise, was supposed to contain infantry in the open. My guys couldn't help but raise a cheer when the squadron of A-7's made high speed strafing runs over the area one by one with their 20 mm Vulcans loaded with HE. Quite impressive actually.

In Vietnam one of the most appreciated armored vehicles used in the infantry support roles was the M-42 "Duster", designed as an anti-aircraft component for armored formations. It was armed with twin full-auto 40 mm Bofors M2A1 guns. A paragraph lifted from the Wikipedia entry for the Duster says it all:

"Despite a few air kills early, the air threat posed by North Vietnam never materialized, and ADA crews found themselves increasingly involved in ground support missions. Most often the M42 was on point security, convoy escort or perimeter defense. The "Duster" (as it was called by U.S. troops in Vietnam) was soon found to excel in ground support. The rapid firing 40mm guns could devastate massed infantry attacks or sweep away guerrillas hiding in the jungle, with equal ease."

I knew a guy who was assigned to an ADA unit in VN. They called their Dusters "AFE" guns, for "Anti F___ing Anything".

Obviously there weren't a lot of enemy planes to shoot at... ;)

Their unit supposedly was selected for field trials of the M163 Vulcan air defense gun, and the only thing they ever did with it was go out and shoot up an evacuated village from a couple of rice paddy dikes away while some brass watched and made appreciative noises.

I knew a guy, retired USN, who'd served in Nam with the riverine force. Their base ships were converted LSTs, armed with 40mm guns, which they used in direct fire missions. Likewise many of the riverine craft such as the so-called Monitor carried the 40mm.

By the start of WWII, all American fighters were armed with .50 BMGs. Nobody ever told them they couldn't strafe unprotected troops with these guns, nor with the heavier autocannons and gatlings that replaced them.

As for explosive shells, what does field artillery and fire? Even for smaller ones, I very seriously doubt that the Army ever told its troops that using their grenade launchers on troops was a Geneva/Hague violation. In fact, one of several Army concepts for future armament is to replace the rifle with a 20mm weapon that fires grenades aimed to pass over or to the side of cover, and then explode just behind the enemy.

And the final answer to arguments about using an "antimateriel" weapon on troops: uniforms are military materiel. Too bad for the guy inside the uniform. In warfare, file collateral damage happens.

Finally, I once went back and read the original Hague convention (1899). It forbade dumdum bullets, chemical warfare, and dropping bombs from balloons. Six years later, both sides were releasing poison gas by the ton, Zeppelins were bombing England. (The English response was to copy the first Zeppelin they could shoot down on land, although their dirigibles didn't enter service until 1919.) The only reason the dumdum bullet ban was ever respected was that it made sense militarily - in a civilized European war, where you can expect unwounded men to leave the battle and carry the wounded to the hospital. It always has been idiotic when the enemy lacks hospitals... The chemical warfare ban was reinstated after WWI, because it had been demonstrated quite thoroughly that when the enemy can obtain gas masks and chemical weapons too, no one wins by using them. But Russians and many others have never respected that ban when the enemy is primitive or underequipped (Afghanistanis, Kurds, etc.)